Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

Tuesday, February 18, 2014

Russell's Leaky Teapot Revisited

Gary Gutting recently interviewed Alvin Plantinga in the pages of The New York Times and brought up the business about Bertrand Russell's celestial teapot. The following response of Gutting to Plantinga comes early on in the interview:

G.G.: You say atheism requires evidence to support it. Many atheists deny this, saying that all they need to do is point out the lack of any good evidence for theism. You compare atheism to the denial that there are an even number of stars, which obviously would need evidence. But atheists say (using an example from Bertrand Russell) that you should rather compare atheism to the denial that there’s a teapot in orbit around the sun. Why prefer your comparison to Russell’s?

Russell's comparison has long struck me as lame, and so I want to revisit and rethink this topic. What follows is an old post from August 2010 amended and substantially expanded:

Gutting, Dawkins, and Russell's Celestial Teapot

To say that the universe was created by a good and powerful being who cares about us is an extraordinary claim, so improbable to begin with that we surely should deny it unless there are decisive arguments for it (arguments showing that it is highly probable). Even if Dawkins’ arguments against theism are faulty, can’t he cite the inconclusiveness of even the most well-worked-out theistic arguments as grounds for denying God’s existence?

He can if he has good reason to think that, apart from specific theistic arguments, God’s existence is highly unlikely. Besides what we can prove from arguments, how probable is it that God exists? Here Dawkins refers to Bertrand Russell’s example of the orbiting teapot. We would require very strong evidence before agreeing that there was a teapot in orbit around the sun, and lacking such evidence would deny and not remain merely agnostic about such a claim. This is because there is nothing in our experience suggesting that the claim might be true; it has no significant intrinsic probability.

But suppose that several astronauts reported seeing something that looked very much like a teapot and, later, a number of reputable space scientists interpreted certain satellite data as showing the presence of a teapot-shaped object, even though other space scientists questioned this interpretation. Then it would be gratuitous to reject the hypothesis out of hand, even without decisive proof that it was true. We should just remain agnostic about it.

The claim that God exists is much closer to this second case. There are sensible people who report having had some kind of direct awareness of a divine being, and there are competent philosophers who endorse arguments for God’s existence. Therefore, an agnostic stance seems preferable to atheism.

I have a serious problem with Gutting's response to the Russell-Dawkins tag team. Gutting concedes far too much in his reply, namely, that it even makes sense to compare the claim that there is an orbiting teapot with the claim that God exists. Instead of attacking this comparison as wrongheaded from the outset, Gutting in effect concedes its aptness when he points out that, just as there could be (inconclusive) scientific evidence of a celestial teaspot, there could be (inconclusive) experiential and argumentative evidence for the existence of God. So let me try to explain why I think that the two existence claims ('God exists' and 'A celestial teapot exists') are radically different.

If someone asserts that there there is a celestial teapot orbiting the Sun, or an angry unicorn on the far side of the Moon, or that 9/11 was an 'inside job,' one will justifiably demand evidence. "It's possible, but what's your evidence for so outlandish a claim?" It is the same with God, say many atheists. The antecedent probability of God's existence, they think, is on a par with the extremely low antecedent probability of there being a celestial teapot or an irate lunar unicorn, a 'lunicorn,' if you will.

But this is to assume something that a sophisticated theist such as Thomas Aquinas would never grant, namely, that God, if he exists, is just another being among the totality of beings. For Aquinas, God is not an ens (a being) but esse ipsum subsistens (self-subsistent Being). God is not a being among beings, but Being itself. Admittedly, this is not an easy notion; but if the atheist is not willing to grapple with it, then his animadversions are just so many grapplings with a straw man.

Why can't God be just another being among beings in the way an orbiting teapot would be just another being among beings were it to exist? I hope it is clear that my point is not that while a teapot is a material object, God is not. That's true, of course, but my point cuts much deeper: if God exists, he exists in a way dfferent from the way contingent beings exist.

First of all, if God exists, then God is the metaphysical ground of the existence of every contingent being. Every such being on classical theism is continuously maintained in existence by the exercise of divine power. Thus every contingent being is radically dependent for its existence on divine activity. The same cannot be said about an orbiting teapot. If 'ontic' means pertaining to beings, and 'ontological' means pertaining to the Being of beings (the esse of entia), then 'God exists' is both ontic and ontolological. It says that there is a being possessing such-and-such divine attributes, but it also says something about the Being of what is other than God, namely, that its Being is createdness, a form of continuous ontological dependency. 'An orbiting teapot exists,' however is merely an ontic claim. It says or implies nothing about the Being of anything distinct from it. Now this difference between an ontic-ontological claim and a merely ontic one strikes me as very important. It is a difference that throws a spanner into the works of such facile comparisons as Russell's.

Second, on some accounts necessarily existent abstracta are also dependent on God. If (Fregean) propositions are divine thoughts then they are dependent on God despite their metaphysical necessity. The exist necessarily, but they have their necessity not from themselves but from another. Not so for the teapots and the unicorns.

Third, God is not only the ultimate ground of all beings, both contingent and necessary (except himself); he is also the ultimate ground of the intelligibility of all beings, of their aptness to be understood by us or anyone, their aptness to be subjects of true predications. Propositional or sentential truth is made possible by ontic truth, the intelligibility of that which is veridically represented by true propositions. But I don't think one would want to say that an angry unicon on the far side of the moon is the ultimate ground of intelligibility.

Fourth, God is the ultimate source of all value.

Fifth, God is the all-pervasive One, immanent in each thing yet transcendent of all things. This is not true of lunar unicorns and celestial teapots. If there is a lunar unicorn, then this is just one more isolated fact about the universe. But if God exists, then everything is unified by this fact: everything has the ground of its being and its intelligibility and its value snd its unity in the creative activity of this one paradigmatic purely spiritual being, a being who does not have existence like a teapot but is its existence

So, on a sophisticated conception, God cannot be just one more being among beings. The Source of being is not just another thing sourced. The ground of intelligibility is not just another intelligible item. The Thinker behind every thought is not just another thought. The locus and source of all value is not just another valuable thing. The One is not just another member of the Many.

These differences between God classically conceived and outlandish specimens of space junk is connected with the fact that one can argue from general facts about the universe to the existence of God, but not from such facts to the existence of lunar unicorns and celestial teapots. Thus there are various sorts of cosmological argument that proceed a contingentia mundi to a ground of contingent beings. But there is no similar a posteriori argument to a celestial teapot. There are also arguments to God from truth, from consciousness, from apparent design, from desire, from morality, and others besides. But as far as I know there are no similar arguments to teapots or unicorns or flying spaghetti monsters.

The very existence of these arguments shows two things.

First, since they move from very general facts (the existence of contingent beings, the existence of truth) to the existence of a source of these general facts, they show that God is not a being among beings, not something merely in addition to what is ordinarily taken to exist. Affirming and denyng the existence of God is not simply a matter of adding to or subtracting from a pre-given ontological inventory. For God does not make a merely ontic difference, but an ontological one as well. The existence of God changes the ontology. For if God exists, then the Being of non-divine entities is createdness, hence different from what it would be were there no God. Socrates is a being whose existence/nonexistence makes no difference to the system of ontological categories, and no difference to the nature of existence, property-possession, etc. God, however, is a being whose existence/nonexistence does make such a difference.

Second, these arguments give positive reason for believing in the existence of God. Are they compelling? No, but then no argument for any substantive philosophical conclusion is compelling.

People like Russell, Dawkins, and Dennett who compare God to a celestial teapot betray by so doing a failure to understand, and engage, the very sense of the classical theist's assertions. To sum up. (i) God is not a gratuitous posit in that there are many detailed arguments for the existence of God; (ii) God is not a physical being; (iii) God is not a being who simply exists alongside other beings. In all three respects, God is quite unlike a celestial teapot, a lunar uncorn, an invisible hippopotamus, and suchlike concoctions.

God is a not a being among beings, but the very Being of beings. To deny God, then, is not like denying an orbiting teapot; it is more like denying Being itself, and with it, beings. Or it is more like denying truth itself as opposed to denying that a particular proposition is true.

One who appreciates this ought to find discussions about the antecedent probability of theism as compared to teapotism faintly absurd. The question of the antecedent probability of something like Russell's teapot makes sense and has an easy answer: very low! The question of the antecedent probability of there being truths has no clear sense. The probability of a proposition is the probability of its being true. Hence, that there is truth, or that there are truths, is a presupposition of any meaningful talk of probability. It is therefore senseless to ask about the antecedent probability of there being truths, and the following answer is clearly absurd: the antecedent probabilty of there being any true propositions is extremely low.

Now my point is that the God question is like the truth question, not like the teapot question.

Unfortunately, the line I have sketched here will be rejected both by all atheists, but also by many theists, those theists who think of God as a being among beings, uniquely qualified no doubt, but no different in his Being or in the way he has properties than any other being qua being. Or, in the quasi-Heideggerian jargon employed above, these theists will say that 'God exists' is an ontic, not an ontic-ontological claim, and as such no different than 'Socrates exists' or 'Russell's celestial teapot exists.'

And the widely-bruited 'death of God?' It is an 'event' of rather more significance than the discovery that there is no celestial teapot (or Santa Claus, or . . . ) after all. As Nietzsche observed, the death of God is the death of truth.